by James Jones
Agnes got up from her seat at the mangle agitatedly—she did not feel like ironing any more damned sheets; she was going to start having Old Jane Staley two days a week, by God, if she could get the old harridan to come that often—and went into the dining room and sat down at the big table.
She could have died! actually gotten so sick she’d have died; and he’d not even have known it! and he had not even asked her whether she felt well.
Agnes longed to go in the bedroom and snatch him up off that bed and give it to him straight right now. But—she knew it wasn’t wise, he’d had enough to swallow for one dose, and she contained herself.
But to not even notice that she’d been sick! She had come home from Dotty Callter’s shop, put the new lingerie and slips neatly away in her bureau, and then as regular as clockwork had gone in the bathroom and begun to vomit. When she was empty and had gotten over the dizziness and strain, she had gone to the phone and weakly called Doc Cost’s new hospital. The girl on the switchboard informed her that Doctor Cost was not in but would probably be at the Elks Club about now, since it was mid-afternoon. So Agnes called for him there. He was in the bar. He came right out.
Agnes was in bed when he got there. As if he expected that, Doc Cost only rapped perfunctorily once or twice and came on in, carrying his battered old black bag which, in spite of the new hospital and all the money he had made, he still carried. He was a big man, and he almost filled the bedroom door as he came through it.
He was too big to look like a doctor, with mild embarrassed eyes (which were nevertheless astute) and which were always vaguely apologetic because he had made such a lot of money in a profession which was—or was supposed, at least to be—a profession of service rather than of profit. He was—as he himself often said—on the wrong side of fifty-five, though not yet nearing sixty—and looked a great deal younger; and he drank a lot and showed it. Right now he was something more than half drunk, and he sat down on the other bed and wafted over Agnes a breath of partially assimilated whiskey, which for some years now had been one of the most comforting and safest odors Agnes was aware of.
Doc Cost—almost no one called him anything but that—had been the Hirshes’ family physician since their marriage, and before. Ever since, in fact, the time when Frank’s father had run off with Doc’s first wife and Doc’s savings; which was when Frank had started to cultivate him and had called him in on all the Hirsh family illnesses. Doc had apparently understood this. He had been Frank’s doctor ever since. He had not apparently held it against Frank: what Frank’s father did; and they had become good friends.
She looked at him weakly from the bed.
“What is it this time, Agnes?” he said, the breath of whiskey getting thicker and wafting pleasantly about her. “Same old thing?”
Then, before she could answer, he suddenly got up and walked to the foot of her bed and stood, his arms folded and swaying ever so slightly, looking down at her. As if belatedly realizing he perhaps might be swaying a little, he took two or three steps backward and propped his back against the wall, and continued to look at her, arms folded.
“I’ve been vomiting,” Agnes said. “Dizziness and sick at my stomach. Nervous indigestion, I guess.”
He nodded and unfolded his arms.
“You haven’t been drinking too much?” he said.
“No more than usual,” Agnes said, and shook her head weakly. It was strange that his drinking did not upset her any, but it had always been that way. You knew without thinking about it that whenever he needed to be sober, he would be—and would not be hung over, either. You also knew he would never fumble, never reach around in his bag and come out with the wrong pill. That was just Doc Cost. A big man and all meat except for his heavy stomach, he inspired confidence in the same way that most other people inspire just the opposite. You knew he knew—whatever it was; and that he would never censure.
“I’ll give you something to quiet you down and settle your stomach,” Doc said, looking at her gently. “I don’t guess it’s anything to get worried about.”
“Oh no; I’m sure,” Agnes said. “I thought I knew what it was. But I just thought I ought to call you anyway.” She was sitting half up in the bed, with the covers tucked around her just under her breasts, and she was aware of him looking her body under the covers, but she did not mind. The nightgown was not a very sheer one. She was not an unattractive woman, for her age, even if she was thickening a little; and if her breasts sagged a little, they were still ample and fairly shapely, she thought. And it was nice to know there were still some men who wanted to look at you. And besides, Doc would never do anything, he was always a perfect gentleman, she had known him for years. “I just wanted to be sure, you know,” she said.
Again Doc nodded. “I’ll just take your temperature and your pulse,” he said, coming around between the beds where his bag was. His hands were sure, reaching in it for the thermometer, and his big sausage fingers—so light of touch for their size—were gentle on her wrist as he felt the artery. “I suppose Frank must be out of town,” he said casually, “or you’d have called him.”
“Oh yes,” Agnes said quickly. “Or I would have. But he’s up in Chicago on a big Jewelers’ Association convention.”
Doc took the thermometer out of her mouth, read it, wiped it with an alcohol swab of cotton, and put it away. “Both normal. I don’t think I’ll need to check your heart. Our bellies are connected to our heads, Agnes,” he said. “I guess nobody really knows just how much of our sickness is due to our mental attitude at the time. Maybe it all is. I don’t know. Or why some people get tuberculosis when we all of us have the germs in our bodies all our lives. The AMA wouldn’t much like me for saying that, I guess,” he grinned. “Have you still got those sedatives I gave you?”
“Some,” Agnes said. “I still use them to help me sleep, sometimes. But I’ve used them sparingly,” she added.
Doc nodded. “Guilts have a lot to do with our sicknesses, I think,” he said. He poured a handful of sedatives out of a big-mouthed bottle and slid them into an envelope. “But not like the head shrinkers think, I don’t think.” He had disliked psychiatrists for years. “Don’t use any more than you have to,” he said, handing it to her together with the medicine. “And never more than one at a time. Don’t want to get to needing them.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Agnes said.
“I guess the AMA wouldn’t like that, either,” Doc grinned, closing the bag and getting up, “but then I don’t do it with everyone.” He smiled down at her, the wide, open eyes seeming not even to be focused. Abruptly, he ran his hand back through his hair. He’s really a very big man, she thought, huge; and it always surprised you. “Guess I better get back to my poker game,” he said, grinning again that strange grin which all seemed to take place on his mouth and face and the skin around his eyes. “Boys are takin me. Stay in bed a few days if you want to. That man who said A man’s home is his castle was wrong. There’s always too many people around. What he should have said was one’s bed is one’s fortress. If you feel like you want me again for anything, just call me. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll figure you’re all right,” he said. “Goodby.”
“Goodby, Doctor,” Agnes said.
She listened until she heard the door close, and then in a moment the sputtering of the little MG on the drive, backing out. He drove it winter and summer although he had a four-car garage at home, which in addition to the two foreign cars also contained a big Chrysler sedan. He was a strange man. She already felt much better. Guilts, he had said: Doc. Thinking with comforting satisfaction of the packaged Swedish glass up on the shelf, and the lingerie and slips in the drawer, she turned over and went soothingly to sleep.
She woke in the evening to the sound of a voice. It was Dawn on the telephone. She listened in the semi-darkness of the bedroom.
“Where?” Dawn was saying. “No, Wally. Thanks, but I really can’t tonight.”
…
“Mother i
sn’t feeling well. Yes. And I think I ought to stay around the house tonight. Anyway I have some work to do on my French.”
…
“No. Nothing serious.”
…
“No. She doesn’t need me. When Mother’s sick, she likes to be let alone. But I want to stay around.”
…
“No. Really, Wally. I don’t want to go out tonight.”
…
“You’ll have more fun without me anyway.”
…
“Well, there. You see?”
…
“Goodby.”
The phone was hung up, and then she came to the bedroom door, her shadow making a silhouette in the lighted door frame on the wall. Then she quietly went away. Happily, Agnes went back to sleep.
Sitting at the big dining room table, and looking toward the bedroom door where Frank had disappeared, Agnes loved her daughter. Loved her very deeply. So much so it almost made the tears come. Dawn understood her.
She had stayed in bed three days, getting up only to make herself a light meal now and then. Dawn took care of herself, and cooked her own meals, and left her alone. She had been through these sessions before, Agnes thought; she understood. But the fourth day was the day Jane came to clean, and she did not want Jane to see her in bed, so she had gotten up, and getting up had stayed up.
And she was reasonably proud of it.
That was the same day that Dave, with a strange urgent note in his voice, had called her about Frank. Evidently, they were going to go ahead with it.
Again, she found herself looking toward the bedroom door where Frank had gone. After a moment, she got up from the table and went to get the new novel she was reading.
Chapter 20
IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS to get the taxi service set up, almost another week to get it operating. There was the building and lot to rent. Then the cars to buy. Titles and licenses to be applied for, corporate papers to be made out, the contracts to sign. Frank did almost all of the work himself. For a week, they hardly saw him at the store and Edith and Al ran it. As he worked, he was already planning that if this worked out, if it paid for itself, he was going to get hold of a couple good secondhand buses in Indianapolis and start a city bus service in a year or two.
The building he finally rented was a block off the square on South Plum Street, one of a cluster of tacky little buildings that had never been replaced by anything better. It had been a rundown lunch counter, which had gone under a year ago, and had been in disuse since then and showed it. He did not care. He did not want a good building, he wanted a cheap one. And this one was on an alley and had a back lot on the falling hillside which had been built up level and would park several cars. He would rather have had a lot on Wernz Avenue, the main street, but nothing was available there, and he would not have paid the price if any had been.
He enjoyed himself equally as much in getting the cars, but this was a different kind of enjoyment. He was, as he had told Dave, a silent partner in the Dodge-Plymouth agency—not even Judge Deacon knew this; in fact, no one did, except himself and Slim Carroll and Slim’s attorney who drew the papers. Slim had needed money several times when Frank had happened to have it and he had advanced it against shares of the business. So he got good buys on cars he knew he could trust. The pleasure was in the getting of them cheap, and in the secrecy.
There was the matter of the drivers. When everything else was done, he went out to hire them. It had somehow—by some occult osmosis, in spite of everything he could do—gotten around town that Frank Hirsh was starting a taxi stand, and several people had approached him for jobs. He turned them all down. He had given some little thought to this matter. He wanted to save money on the drivers. He had a choice of hiring reputable dependable men, in which case he would have to match the salaries paid by Sternutol or Kentucky Oil, or by the stores uptown. Or he could hire kids just out of high school, who lived at home, had no families of their own to support, but were usually pretty wild drivers.
He thought briefly of hiring women drivers, but discarded this because of his feeling that women were too nervous to make good drivers; the kids would be better—and also he had an intuitive feeling that women drivers would not sit too well in Parkman, somehow. In a city, maybe. But not here.
But there was still another element in the town he might draw from. These were the type of undependables and semi-disreputables to which Dewey Cole and Hubie Murson might be said to belong: younger fellows most of them, some of them married, some unmarried, whose families had never amounted to much in town, but mainly men who were sort of misfits and would rather live and work cheap than to hold down steady respectable well-paying jobs that they would have to go to every day.
Frank was aware of what he was getting into. Someone would always be quitting. Because a customer had insulted him. Or he wanted to go to St Petersburg and work on the docks for the winter. Or he got drunk and forgot to come home from Terre Haute for a month—or if he was more honest than most because he was just plain bored, disgusted because the novelty had worn off. Yeh, there would be a constant turnover of personnel. But there were several advantages on the other side. All of these young guys loved to drive cars; and rarely—if ever—did any of them ever get enough money to buy one. Also, there would always be quite a number of them hanging around town, and replacements should be fairly easy to get—especially since the job was driving. Last, but most important, there was the money they could be hired for.
It was not at all the same as his store, where respectability was a necessary asset. Nobody cared who drove them down town in a taxi—as long as they didn’t run into something.
Having made up his mind, Frank sallied forth to do his hiring. Shrewdly, he went to the Foyer. The Foyer was the other poolroom on the square. The chief difference between it and the Athletic Club was that the Foyer was the hangout of store owners and businessmen and of the townsmen in general, while the Ath Club was more the hangout of the high school kids and the country men. Nobody knew why this was so. It had always just been that way. Frank drank two beers and played two games of pool. He went there at nine o’clock in the morning and before eleven he had all three of his drivers hired.
A good sample of one of them was Albin Shipe. Albie Shipe was twenty-eight and had hung around Parkman all his life until he became a sort of fixture. His aged father had been Parkman’s only garbageman from the time Frank could first remember up until five years before the war, when he died. At sixteen, Albie had left school and got a job taking care of the courthouse furnace for the janitor, and from there graduated to a series of similar jobs. He was not a moron, or an idiot, or anything like that. He was just slow, and easily contented. He had always lived in the present moment and lacked the foresight to see where studying might have someday been important to him. He laughed a lot in a loud voice and read a great many comic books. Frank felt very paternal when he hired him. He had been meaning for a long time to get himself a small place where he could run some horses, when he got the money. Albie would make him a wonderful caretaker for it. Albie himself had been very pleased.
The other two men Frank hired were similar types. A lean little ferret-faced youth named Fitzjarrald, whose family had come here from the East before 1860; and a tall blond boy named Lee, probably a distant poor relation of all the Virginia Lees, since his family had come to Parkman from the South, in 1870, after the Civil War.
He was really very pleased with his selection, and from there he went to see the owner of the filling station nearest to the cabstand—already he was beginning to think of it as that—where he arranged a deal to get gas and oil and service at a discount in return for doing all his business there. . . .
But of course, all of this was done only after he had seen Dave and signed the contracts. He would never have gone ahead, if that had not been done first thing.
The day after getting home he had gone around to the judge’s office and picked up the contracts—while the judge stare
d at him as if reading the inside of his head, and made him mad again. They talked about a couple of other business deals briefly and passed the time of day just as if they were still friends. As soon as he got back to the store, he had called for Dave at the hotel.
His brother wasn’t there, the clerk—Freddy Barker, that one-eyed boy—informed him. He had gone out early, and left word to tell anyone who called that he had gone for a ride down in the country and to take their names and he would call back later.
“Gone for a ride!” Frank said, instinctively thinking of the judge, although he had just left him. “With who?”
“By himself,” Freddy said. “In his own car, Mr Hirsh.”
Frank thanked him and hung up. In his own car! Well, there was nothing to do but wait. Frank wished he had not stayed so long in Chicago. He wondered how much he paid for it? He wished he had not gone to Chicago at all. Shortly after noon, Dave called him back. He sounded a little more than half tight. Sitting at his desk and looking at the back of Edith Barclay’s pretty head, Frank suddenly decided it might be better if he went over to the hotel. He had intended for Dave to come over here. Dave seemed perfectly amenable to the suggestion. He hung up and got the contracts out of his desk and put them in the pocket of his coat.
Dave ushered him into the suite wearing an expensive-looking pair of flannel slacks and a garish Hollywood sport shirt. Frank found he was surprised, he had seen him only in his uniform and he had not thought about him ever changing it for civilian clothes. He decided he did not look so tough, in civvies. Dave’s face was red and his eyes a little wavery.
“Before we do anything else,” Dave said, “I want to tell you something. I don’t have fifty-five hundred anymore. I only have five thousand. I bought a car.”